pathetic meant. It has no equivalent in Italian and is not easy to translate. They went to the opera or the theater and were basically terribly bored, but at the end of the performance they always clapped enthusiastically and made no attempt to appear sophisticated, having paid so much money for their tickets. They always paid the standard price, which no Viennese would dream of doing. The Viennese never pay the full price for their tickets but at most pay half price, leaving the full price to foreigners and provincials, who always clap most because they’ve paid so much for their seats. We always had to stand with Mother in front of the famous shops, which were not always the best shops, and gaze at the window displays. She would then go in, head held high, and I never knew her to leave without having made a purchase. After visiting two or three shops we had to walk beside her, loaded with large parcels, and it was only when they became too heavy for us that she would relent and agree to take a rest at the Sacher or the Bristol, where we usually stayed. She would have loved to buy up everything and take it all home to Wolfsegg. What are you going to do with all these things? my father would ask. You won’t wear them. You can’t wear them at Wolfsegg because that would be ridiculous, and in Salzburg nobody will appreciate how expensive they are, or in Linz for that matter, let alone in Wels. They’ll all hang in the closet and go out of fashion, and then you’ll sell them or give them away. But Mother would have none of this. They always returned from Vienna with a dozen parcels, and at least half a dozen more would arrive subsequently, containing items that she had bought surreptitiously, without witnesses. Mother spent a fortune on clothes, but she never wore them, or wore them only two or three times, after which she would throw them away or hand them on. But heaven forbid that my sisters should ever fancy designer dresses like hers! They were not allowed to buy a single dress in Vienna, even when they were forty. Even at forty they had to make do with one or two dresses from the sales in Wels, since our Lambach dressmaker was still the chief purveyor of their wardrobe, which consisted, as I have said, of the revolting dirndls that their mother had made for them twice a year. They were not even allowed to choose the cloth, because Mother did not trust their taste, though she herself had no taste whatever. The dirndls always turned out either too large or too small, or the colors clashed, or the collars were too wide or too narrow, or the sleeves too long or too short. The skirts were always at least eight inches too long, and the aprons never matched the dresses. Mother always dressed her daughters like dolls. She treated them as if they were dolls and never saw them as anything other than dolls. Like so many mothers, she regarded her daughters as dolls from the day each was born, and one could probably say without exaggeration that she gave birth to them not as human beings but as dolls. Even in adulthood she had to have one or more dolls to play with. Her daughters were never more than dolls and thus satisfied her passionate play instinct; as a result she would never let go of them. They always had to react like dolls. Every day she dressed them, fed them, and took them for walks like dolls, and at night she would put them to bed like dolls. Even at forty, it seems, these dolls, my sisters, are still subservient to my mother’s play instinct. And my brother was a puppet all his life — Punch, so to speak. She brought him up as a reserve puppet, in anticipation of the time when her premier puppet, her husband, would no longer be around. To my mother, with her craze for dolls, my sisters were actually talking dolls that could be made to laugh or cry when she wished and dressed and undressed when she wished, while her husband and son were puppets, whose strings she pulled whenever the mood took her. Mother was governed by a quite perverse play instinct. She turned Wolfsegg into a perfectly regimented dolls’ world in which everyone obeyed her orders to the letter. Wolfsegg was her dolls’ house, its surroundings her dolls’ world. Not wanting to be a doll in a dolls’ house, I soon removed myself from this dolls’ house and this dolls’ world, which seem even more oppressive and hideous when viewed from outside, from a distance. Wolfsegg is a dolls’ house, I told Gambetti, and its surroundings nothing more or less than a dolls’ world, ruled by my mother in the most ruthless and inhuman fashion. Gambetti laughed loudly, accusing me of monstrous overstatement and telling me that I was a typical Austrian pessimist with a grotesquely negative outlook. I replied that my overstatements were in fact monstrous understatements and that the Wolfsegg I had described to him was idyllic by comparison with the real Wolfsegg. Gambetti, I said, you can’t imagine Wolfsegg; you’ve never had the opportunity to visit such a hideous dolls’ house. There’s no other such hideous dolls’ landscape in the world. My father, I said, is a puppet of well over seventy, with moribund limbs and a head that’s become dull and hard from being tugged at all its life. My brother is a puppet in its forties that similarly doesn’t resist the constant tugging at its head and has given up defending itself against its unspeakable puppet mother. The Germans have a mother fixation, I said, and so have the Austrians. Mothers are not to be questioned, mothers are sacred, but in fact most of them are perverse puppet mothers who tug at the heads of their families until they’ve tugged them to death. Germany and Austria don’t have mothers like those in the Latin countries, who are natural mothers, not puppet mothers, I said. In Germany and Austria there are only puppet mothers, who spend all their lives relentlessly tugging at their puppet husbands and puppet children until these puppet husbands and puppet children have been tugged to death. In Central Europe there are no longer any natural mothers, only artificial mothers, puppet mothers who bring artificial children into the world. Even in the remotest Alpine valleys you won’t find natural mothers any longer, only artificial mothers. And it’s self-evident that an artificial mother invariably gives birth to an artificial child, which goes on to procreate another. As a result we now have only artificial human beings, not natural human beings. It’s a fallacy to call human beings natural, for none of them is. What we have now is the artificial human being, and we’re alarmed when we come across a natural human being again, because it’s something we’re not prepared for, because for so long we’ve been confronted only with artificial human beings, who’ve been ruling the world for ages, a world that long ago ceased to be a natural world and is now thoroughly artificial, Gambetti, an artificial world. The artificial world produced the artificial human being, and conversely the artificial human being produced the artificial world. Nothing is natural any longer, I said. We start from the premise that everything is natural, but that’s a fallacy. Everything is artificial, everything is artifice. Nature no longer exists. We always start from the contemplation of nature, when for ages we should have been starting from the contemplation of artifice. That’s why everything’s so chaotic. So false. So desperately confused. Where there’s no nature there can be no contemplation of nature, Gambetti — that must be obvious. The photo of my brother getting into his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee shows him posing as a happy person, but in the photo he is the unhappiest person imaginable. In the photo taken in front of Uncle Georg’s villa in Cannes my sisters are frozen in an expression of happiness that makes them look far unhappier than they really are. My father and mother, pictured at Victoria Station in London, look as unhappy as they are, while trying to look happy. I wonder why it is that when people have themselves photographed they always want to look happy, or at any rate less unhappy than they are. Everybody wants to appear happy, never unhappy, to project a falsified image, never a true image of the unhappy person he is. Everyone wants to be portrayed as good-looking and happy, when they are in fact ugly and unhappy. They take refuge in the photograph, they deliberately shrink into the photograph, which produces a totally false image, showing them as happy and good-looking, or at least not as ugly and unhappy as they are. What they demand of the photograph is an ideal image of themselves, and they will agree to anything that produces this ideal image, even the most dreadful distortion. It never strikes them how appallingly they compromise themselves. The good-looking person in a photograph is invariably the ugliest, the happy one invariably the unhappiest. They have photographs taken of themselves and hang them on their walls as representations of a happy and beautiful world, though in reality it is the unhappiest, ugliest, and falsest of all worlds. All their lives they stare at the happy pictures on their walls and are gratified by them, though they ought to be appalled. But because they don’t think, they are shielded from the awful knowledge that they are unhappy, ugly, and false. They even show visitors these pictures in which they think they are portrayed as happy and good-looking people, though the visitors can see at a glance how ugly, unhappy, and stupid their hosts really are. They are not even ashamed to show them to people who actually know them and can therefore recognize them on the photos as mendacious and totally false individuals, totally lost souls. We live in two worlds, I told Gambetti — the real world, which is mean, depressing, and ultimately deadly, and the world of the photograph, which is thoroughly false, though it is regarded by most people as the ideal world. If you deprived people of their photographs, if you ripped them off their walls and destroyed them, once and for all, you’d deprive them of more or less everything. Hence, there’s nothing people cling to so much, nothing they rely on so much, as the photograph. The photograph is their salvation, Gambetti. At this Gambetti laughed and called me